Seven Year Old Vs. The Dryer

Last week, one of my facebook posts went something like this, "twenty plus minutes to move clothes from the washer to the dryer. All because the five year old and seven year old are trying to figure out if the light in the dryer stays on when you close the door."

Soon after Josiah, the five year old, came downstairs and told me, "Mom the dryer light stays on when you close the door."  That means either a five year old or seven year old made it in to the dryer and closed the door.  Despite being told not to.

Fast forward to Tuesday.  Another Laundry Day.  Liam's laundry day job is to move the close from the washer to the dryer and from the dryer to our bedroom (where we all fold them at the end of the day).  Liam swaps the clothes and starts the dryer.  When it finishes, he went to check on them.  Still wet.  I thought that was odd since we had just purchased this "new to us" dryer and it had been running so smoothly for over three weeks.  I followed them upstairs to make sure they had it on the right setting.  They did.  We went about our business of morningness and in the afternoon I remembered the dryer and asked Liam to swap it.  He obliged but then quickly came down to tell me they were wet.  I trudged up the steps and investigated.  Sure enough, the clothes were very wet.  I started the dryer and it came on and was heating up, but when I opened the door, the clothes had not moved.  The drum belt was messed up.

I quickly called Mark and alerted him to our dilemma and then set to work to start drying the two loads that had been washed.  I was very grateful that our "mother's helper" was there that morning. 

This is what we came up with:

We covered the entire upstairs in clotheslines.  At first, I couldn't find rope so we went with the verse, "a cord of three strands is not easily broken..."  and twisted together three pieces of yarn.  While wandering around in our bedroom, I found rope.  Paracord to be precise.  Paracord, for those that aren't hip and in to survival bracelets, is a super strong rope used to make survival bracelets.

So intricately woven were the clotheslines that the kids had to do some crazy obstacle moves to get to their rooms and the bathroom.  By the way, I ran the cords/string/yarn between doorways and tied them at the hinges.

So, I went to the boys room and used the paracord to make this:

After some activities that evening, we came home and Mark moved this clothesline set to our closet.  I didn't get a picture of that but it was quite humorous.  I also took a load of clothes to Kristina's to get dry.

So Mark took the dryer apart and found that the belt was not broken (thankfully).  It had just slipped off the drum.  He put it back on and we were back in the clothes drying business.

And Liam learned:  40 something pound seven year olds do not need to climb in to a dryer made for 12 pounds of clothes.